Ponzi schemes, especially the insurance companies. They really are a Ponzi scheme.
Think about it, they promise you things asking for money, then when you need their services they decide where you go, how much they will pay (leaving the rest for you to pay as a deductible), then they turn around and increase your costs for their services, that they fight tooth and nail not to pay anything.
A large portion of art/artifacts are forgeries. Everyone is alright with it because galleries and collectors want to brag about having some unique old art piece and forgers are very good at making pieces that would fool anyone who is just looking at it.
You only need to squeeze out an amount the size of a pea on to the bristles of your toothbrush.
The image of squeezing along the entire length of the brush bristles was concocted by an ad agency, a la Mad Men, to make consumers use their toothpaste faster, hence buy more product.
printer ink, it costs them like 3 cents to make each cartridge and they sell it for so god damn much.
they also go out of their way to have chips in the cartridges and in the printers that make the printer not function if any ink is even running low, doesn't matter if you want to print something in black and white you had better fucking buy more cyan ink
You take small loans each month via a credit card that you have to pay back. This increases an imaginary number that lets you take out bigger loans in the furure.
This is all tracked by private companies that you trust with your personal data. That, or you'll not be able to take out a loan if you want to buy a house or start a business.
If you have a good credit score it means that you don't overspend or forget to pay, which you can also achieve with a regular debit card by default. This doesn't serve people, only the banks who expect that a number of people will overspend or not be able to pay their loans back.
Credit cards alone aren't the problem. Forcing them on people with the credit score system is.
Restaurants being rated with “Michelin stars” was created as a ploy to encourage people to buy cars and drive more to go on road trips to these restaurants so they’d wear through more tires and have to buy more
Passiv income in general ,as it obviously constituts itself from other Peoples Active Income , its per definition a scam...
*"Because you once where in need and i lended you some coin , you now have to pay me back a expotentially rising amount of Coin ! its rate of rising is not messured on your harvest or the amount of offspring of your Herd but on Time going forward ! Because it surely will ! , If you Cant you will fall in Debt-Slavery to me. I am a Risktaker . you take the Risk . I Take . Always ." *
Lottery's the expected value is always lower than the prize of a ticket. And even if you win it is on the back of other poor desparete people who lost. An then there is the fact winning often leads to a lot of other problems.
Neither are scams but the UK is fond of permanently doing temporary things. Income tax in the UK was first imposed as a temporary measure to fund the Napoleonic Wars but after Waterloo it was never repealed since it brought in so much. Same sort of deal for the 70 mph national speed limit, it was a temporary measure in the 1960s apparently in response to someone caning it down the motorway in an AC Cobra and as we know, there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
Phoebus Cartel, essentially the few oligopolistic light bulb companies got together and colluded and intentionally reduced the lifespan of light bulbs.
The Bernie Madoff investment scandal. Started in the 1970’s and continued into the 2000’s. It eventually dissolved in 2008 during the financial crisis. There’s a really great documentary on Netflix about it.
Ever since the 90's, almost every protest or riot that has been on TV in the past few decades has been based on circumstances everyone has been misled or lied to about. I say this generally, I'm not speaking about any specific ideology or any particular group. All the protests follow the same pattern of epiphany, yet they keep happening.
The ones that took place during covid scammed us all because covid required those in charge to say "don't worry, us being out in the open didn't cause the virus to spread, we took precautions". Today, covid commercials will say those same groups that those protests were made for were disproportionately affected by covid as if it's because of human right, and nobody is connecting it to the fact the protests happened during a time when every restaurant had plexiglass barriers. Again, not speaking for any group in particular, this was a fault for the Canadian truckers, BLM, those Trump-voting Libertarians, etc.
This thread just opened my eyes. I really thought Lemmy being so young would mean the average users would be pretty saavy and intelligent. Nope, same idiots as Reddit and everywhere else.